Financial market, arena in which prices form to enable the exchange of financial assets to be executed.

Given the advent of electronic trading systems, financial markets can now be structured in many ways. Historically, they were physical meeting places in which traders came into face-to-face contact with one another and trading occurred on the basis of prices being “cried out” on the market floor. Today many financial markets have lost this intensely human dimension. Instead, prices are displayed across a network of computer screens, and assets are bought and sold at the click of a computer mouse or without any human intervention at all. In such instances, the marketplace has become increasingly virtual, as physical proximity between traders is no longer necessary for trade in assets to commence.

Despite this change in the physical configuration of financial marketplaces, the rationale for establishing financial markets remains much as it ever was. Financial markets exist as a means of redistributing risk from the more risk-averse to the less risk-averse. Some risk is attached to holding all financial assets, because the value of those assets can depreciate or appreciate. The more risk-averse the asset holders, the more they will seek to use financial markets to find an intermediary who is willing to accept that risk on their behalf. This, of course, will not be a costless exercise. An intermediary’s willingness to accept a proportion of the risk embodied in an asset will have to be rewarded through the payment of a fee.

This, for instance, is the principle through which money is raised on the capital market to provide the resources for investment in new productive capacity. An investor with cash reserves may choose to invest that cash in an asset that has minimal risk attached to it—say, an interest-bearing bank account, which is an extremely safe asset because the bank has almost a zero default risk. Alternatively, those investors may choose to make their cash available to entrepreneurs via the capital market. Entrepreneurs will approach the capital market to raise additional resources when they have insufficient cash reserves of their own to fund their activities, and they will seek investors to accept some of the risk inherent in their entrepreneurial activities. Investors who make their cash available in such a way will clearly require recompense—that is, a fee—for the additional risks that they are taking, and this recompense takes the form of higher returns than would be available from less-risky investments. The entrepreneur must pay a return in excess of the prevailing rate of interest that the investor would earn from a simple bank account.

Financial markets, then, match the risk-averse with the less risk-averse and savers with borrowers. A smoothly functioning market environment will, in theory, exhibit a symmetrical distribution of risk aversion around the mean, and it will be populated by an equal number of savers and borrowers. In practice, though, the situation is rather more complicated because of the dominance of the speculative motive for holding assets. Following the liberalization of trade in financial assets from the 1970s onward, financial markets increasingly became an arena of speculation.

The textbook financial market allows for unproblematic risk pooling, which leads in turn to an efficient structure of risk management. However, the textbook financial market contains no destabilizing speculation. Indeed, in the classic statement of the case for efficient markets, made in the 1950s, Milton Friedman ruled out the possibility of the very existence of destabilizing speculation. He argued that, to destabilize markets, speculators would have to buy assets for more than the prevailing price in the spot market and sell them for less. This strategy is a money loser, and the continual losses that a destabilizing speculator would make are sufficient to cleanse the market environment of any such actor.

Yet, the speculative trade of assets still dominates contemporary financial markets. In general, investment returns are assumed to be directly proportional to the risks that an investor bears by holding a particular asset. The greater the risks that an investment will not be profitable, the greater the expected returns will be if it proves to be profitable. Speculative positions are adopted in the search for higher-than-average levels of return. Investors would hedge rather than speculate if the returns to the two strategies were equal, because hedging is a safer strategy than speculating.

However, in attempting to increase their expected rate of return, speculators must also accept an enhanced risk that there may be no realized returns at all. Far from speculative financial markets following the textbook model of risk pooling, in reality they multiply the risks of holding financial assets, by subjecting the price of those assets to the vagaries of momentum trading. Speculative financial markets do not present investors with a predictable price structure that minimizes investment risk. Instead, they offer a means of acquiring additional risk, via the uncertainties of speculative price movements, in the search for higher profits.

Speculative financial markets tend to function relatively smoothly as long as participants in the market remain confident that the price of the assets they hold represents fair value. However, such markets are also prone to moments during which that confidence evaporates. In such circumstances, a flurry of selling activity tends to ensue. This is triggered by investors’ attempts to off-load assets to which returns are unlikely to accrue. But all it does is expose the risks that are embedded in assets that are traded speculatively. A market that is bereft of confidence is one in which there is no escape from the enhanced investment risks associated with speculative trading.

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